The World Wide Web may be thought of as a distributed data store comprising billions of data content items through the Internet. Search engines are commonly used to search the content items available on computer networks, such as the World Wide Web, to enable users to locate content items of interest. A typical search engine is capable of accessing the plurality of web pages, hypertext documents, and other content items from the Internet or other network through use of a crawler.
To use search engine, a user of a client device typically enters one or more search terms or keywords comprising a query. The search engine thereafter identifies one or more content items responsive to the one or more search terms or keywords comprising a received query. The content items identified by the search engine may be combined to form a result set that is displayed to the user with which the query originated.
The content items identified by a search engine as responsive to a query received from a user may include one or more advertisements. Advertisements are commonly used on the Internet to promote various products and services. Advertisements may comprise banner ads, links to web pages, images, video, text, etc. The various advertisements used to promote products on the Internet may be displayed according to a variety of formats, such as in conjunction with a ranked result set in response to a query, embedded in a web page, a pop-up, etc. The advertisements displayed to a user of a client device may be selected, redirecting the user to a website providing the advertised product or service.
The one or more advertisements displayed to a user of a client device in response to a query are associated with one or more advertisers. The one or more advertisers associated with the advertisements may specify the keywords in response to which one or more advertisements are to be displayed. For example, an advertiser may specify that a given advertisement associated with computers is to be displayed in response to the keywords “computer,” “desktop,” or “laptop.” A query comprising one or more of the keywords specified by the advertiser may result in the display of the advertiser's advertisement.
A given advertisement displayed to a user of a client device may be associated with a category or topic for which the advertiser may have additional content that the advertiser wishes to display to a given user. For example, a given query received from a user of a device may comprise the terms “car rentals in New York City.” An advertisement identified as responsive to the query may contain images, text, etc., responsive to the query. In addition to the images, text, etc., contained within the advertisement, the advertiser may have additional content that the advertiser wishes to display to the user, such as promotional material, additional images, video clips, coupons, etc.
While techniques exist for displaying advertisements associated with advertiser specified keywords that match or are similar to the one or more search terms comprising a user query, current techniques fail to provide for the retrieval and display supplemental content that an advertiser may wish to display to users in conjunction with a given advertisement. Accordingly, systems and methods are needed to provide for the identification, retrieval, and display of supplemental content associated with a given advertisement displayed in response to a query received from a user of a client device.